Within a patient facility, such as a hospital, nursing home, etc., care providers, such as nurses, physicians, and assistants are valuable assets whose time must be allocated in an efficient manner for proper patient care and patient satisfaction. In the facility, a staff of nurses and other care providers are usually assigned a series of patients in individual rooms to whom they provide care. To that end, nurse call systems may be used provide a line of communication between the patient in a room and a nurse or other care provider.
One common nurse call system has a call button that is located in the patient's room and is accessible by the patient. When the button is pressed, a light outside the patient's room and/or an indicator light at a staff desk is typically turned on to visually indicate the request for help from the patient. This “patient call” is attended to if and when a nurse notices either the light outside the patient's room and/or at the staff desk. As may be appreciated, a significant amount of time might elapse from when the patient initiates the call and when the nurse actually responds.
In other nurse call systems, the patient presses a button to initiate two-way full duplex voice communications with a nurse station. The button is typically a call button, and the nurse then calls back to the patient to talk to them in an attempt to understand the problem before attending to the call. While such a system may provide more immediate attention to the patient's call, it is often disruptive and does not allow the nurse to prioritize or organize the call with respect to its urgency or the time of attention needed.
In still other nurse call systems, devices such as pagers, phones, and/or other telecommunications devices are integrated into the system. As such, the system sends out an alphanumeric message to the nurse that is wearing the pager, phone and/or telecommunications device or carrying the phone in response to receiving a patient call. However, as with call systems that utilize full duplex voice communications, until the nurse makes a call to the room, they do not know what the request or call was for and who needs to attend to it.
Thus, it is typical that nurse call systems require some immediate two-way voice communications to provide the nurse with an indication of what is needed by the patient. This is disruptive to the nurse or other care provider, as they may be in the middle of assisting another patient, performing a task, or otherwise unavailable. Thus, such systems are generally inefficient. Therefore, there is still a need in the art to improve upon the communication between a patient and a nurse or care provider that tends to them.